This morning, the Itanium Solutions Alliance put out a statement with some vague numbers showing the strength of the Itanium server platform in 2008. By IDC's reckoning of the server space in the fourth quarter, shipments of Itanium-based machines rose by 18 per cent and it was the seventh straight quarter of sales that crested above $1bn for the Itanium server category. Data from Gartner's report covering 2008's server sales indicated that Itanium machines outgrew RISC-based alternatives in terms of sales and shipments, growing share in each category.

Unlike the majority of people I like Itanium ... Itanium runs the 3 OS's I like most (QNX aside); OpenVMS, Windows server 2008 R2, and Red Hat linux. It is a good archetecture and the new revision is really going to show it off in good light (finally)...

So, do you use one?

Not in an academic, investigative or toy way - do you use one as your primary machine?

Itanium looks great on paper. The practice is rather more sober. It loses on price/performance, it loses on performance/watt, and it loses on compatibility. Unless you need the scalability it offers on the very high end, it is just not that interesting. As the Amd64 compatible chips move upmarket, it will be less interesting there too.

There is a good parallel with the Alpha. It was also a good chip for a time, but couldn't really compete with commodity hardware. Having Windows support is nice, but limited without any Windows applications. When Alpha died, many geeks (including me) lamented, but the market barely noticed. It just didn't reach the mass necessary to sustain an architecture.